A Family Trust

by Ward Just

  Then, as smooth and offhand as he could make it, he’d tie the one to the other. He’d make the link explicit.

  Of course we know that the paper will not be sold. No one has any intention of selling the newspaper, naturally we’re all agreed on that, This newspaper belongs to the Rising family.

  They’d nod; a sale at that time would be the farthest thing from their minds. He’d say:

  In any case, times change. And God forbid sometimes people change with them. Your father was adamant that the newspaper remain in the family, supervised as he himself would supervise it, hence the establishment of the committee and the trust for purpose of sale. He understood you hoys but of course he’s less certain about the next generation down the line. Your father desired harmony and that is what we will have. There is no reason not to have it. We are, all agreed here.

  He would glance again at the document and say,

  Your father was insistent that you boys remain at the newspaper to carry on its work.

  Then he would tell them what to expect. There would be offers within the next few days. Certainly the proprietors of the Chicano newspapers would make offers, and they would be subtle because no one would want to cause offense. He, Townsend, would take responsebility for saying no in the most forceful terms. Of course the potential buyers would not quite believe him because his name was Townsend and not Rising. And they would not have knowledge of the codicil because while it would be filed as required by law with Marge Reilly, county clerk and friend of the family it would be kept in the closed file.

  So they will come to you boys and it is possible, indeed likely, that they will try to set you one against the other, these aliens, and that of course will be useless—

  Townsend hesitated, lost in thought; then he shook his head. No, a bad idea. Too much loose talk and prediction. Even to raise the question was to admit of its possibility. And there was no possibility of a sale, none at all. There was no purpose therefore in getting into it. Instead he would speak of the newspaper’s tradition and more than its tradition, its potential. That, he decided, was exactly the right note. At any event, it would work for the short term: follow the footsteps of the founder. Restraint. They’d have some help; everyone liked the boys. But at the courthouse and elsewhere they’d be waiting for signs of apostasy. The long dormant underground would waken and begin to probe. They would be waiting to see if Amos’s commitments would be honored, and who would hold the balance of power.

  Amos had given his instructions three days before. “Elliott, you’ve got to help out those boys, Charles in particular. You know the score, you’ve got to make your weight felt. If they bungle it, that’s their own fault; but you’ve got to see to it that they know what’s involved at all times. Who they can count on and who they can’t, and what we’ve been doing all those years—” Easier said than done. There was no protocol or manifesto. In their own way they had tried to create Utopia, a place secure and at ease, where a citizen could go about lawful business without interference. They’d worked to keep aliens out, the taxes low, and the law friendly. They’d worked to make Dement safe, and the power was in the hands of local men, men who were accountable. Amos Rising believed. that the test of a society was not its size—neither census nor bank balance—but the kind of citizen who rose out of it, just that. His own life told him that each man had a location. It was a specific region from which one strayed at great risk to personal equilibrium.; it was neither natural nor safe to live among strangers. He knew what others did not, namely, that the country was violent—violent beyond comprehension. Released from their moorings, Americans were murderous; that was the true meaning of the exploration and occupation of the continent. The government contained these impulses and by “government” he did not mean simply the superstructure of officials, elected and appointed, and the apparatus of law. He knew too many lawyers to have confidence in the rule of law. He believed in an almost mystical constellation of powers that be. Everyone knew who they were, the merchants and the bankers and the judges; landowners and the clergy and professional men generally. These men occupied positions as specific as the men on a chessboard. The men worked in harmony with the town; they understood its past and had a vision of its future. They had a reference for the look of a place; its shape. They knew it as intimately as the palms of their own hands. Dement was no beauty, everyone knew that; but Dement was what they had and they all recognized the dangers of idealization. They were entirely aware of idealization because they had a canon, the newspaper, The Dement Intelligencer, Amos Rising editor & publisher. The I was the textbook; people read it for an understanding of the way life was, the way things were and would be—not everywhere in America, but in Dement for sure. It was to the town as a dictionary is to a language. The people, most of them, believed the newspaper because it did not surprise them; it was never extraordinary. They believed it because they had no cause not to believe it, and because it appeared to have the power of prediction. And of sanction. The secret was not to reveal facts but to withhold them. Elections became contests between men and ghosts. Unsuitable candidates for public office would look in vain for their names in the pages of the I. In any contest between a man and a ghost, the ghost would lose, and this experience led the editor to a hard conclusion: embarrassments were not disclosed, they were concealed. Embarrassments would be dealt with by men who knew the facts and were dependable. Dement in that way was an ossuary, skeletons sealed away in closets everywhere.

  They, he and Amos, believed they were benevolent. This was not the Gothic South nor mercantile New England. It was not a place where a few rich men ran things to suit themselves. There were no rich in Dement. There were no mansions or slums or sweatshops either. Nor was there the cultural chaos of the northern cities or the thick offbeat religious traditions of the South. No family had been in the region longer than four generations, and there were only a few of those; arrival in Dement at the turn of the century was enough to establish a family as “old-line.” And men had migrated to the Midwest to seek fortunes, not freedom; they required a house and land, a job, and political and social stability. Life therefore was even and regular, the contours of people’s lives mirroring the landscape itself.

  Townsend knew that he and Amos had done well enough for fifty years, but he also knew in his bones that night was falling; his era was nearly ended. It puzzled and depressed him because he could not analyze it. In his lifetime he’d been able to analyze to his satisfaction anything that truly interested him, but he couldn’t analyze this. He and Amos were old farts, everyone knew that; they knew it. It was time for them to yield, and everyone knew that, too. But who were the successsors? The question at issue was prosperity, a kind of lunatic prosperity whose sources were unclear. All of the towns ringing Chicago had a common identity, one no different from another; they were children of the big city. And they’d all be consumed sooner or later. Dement was different and had always been different. It was protected by the prairie itself, hundreds of square miles of the richest farmland in the world. The prairie was the sea and Dement an island fortress, remote and self-contained. Those other towns, they were like pilot fish following the shark. The cutting edge was Chicago’s aggression, its heat and energy and money and the influence it bought, It worked as a magnet both ways, the towns attracting Chicago’s money, Chicago supping the towns’ vitality. The towns looked to Chicago for a vision of the prosperous future. But turbulence would follow: opportunity, any opportunity, was blood in the water. He’d spent a good part of his life protecting the community, his town, and did not now intend to see it overrun. So he and Amos had blocked the highway and caused a strict zoning code to be written. They’d brought suit against a Chicago group seeking to establish a television station in Dement, and had won. He and Amos, they looked on themselves as regents of a principality under permanent siege from powerful neighbors. They had insulated Dement from the depredations of various gangsters (politicians, bankers and common criminals) and their armies of adv
ance men—leeches, they could suck a town dry. It wasn’t a question of public morals; neither he nor Amos was a moralist. They left morals to women and preachers. It was a question of control. They did not intend to stand by like peasants, embraced by the long arms of kings. An outsider understood that if he wanted to do business in Dement he would have to deal with the editor, Rising, and his mouthpiece, Townsend, old bastards. They did not mind being so regarded.

  But each year Dement’s situation became more complicated because the encroachments had nothing to do with who was sheriff or who was state’s attorney, or even if there was a sheriff or state’s attorney. The damnable problem was nothing less than the effects of prosperity itself, prosperity producing change and uncertainty and unrealistic expectations. Somehow since the war, government had entered into an alliance with business. Local government had lost its grip and the federals were indifferent to the effect of their programs, bureaucrats believing that it was all one country, each of the forty-eight states identical. Perhaps that was one of the effects of the war, “the national effort.” The war had seemed to give the country a fresh identity, its face Washington, D.C. There was something grandiose and un-American about it—as if, having displayed its prodigious energies abroad, the country had to similarly prove at home: momentum maintained, the war machine redirected. The dubious programs of the New Deal could be (and were) contained, being primarily political. But this was something else. It was an alliance between the government and the capitalists, by which one meant the bankers, builders, industrialists and their hired guns, the lawyers. These were lawyers who had never seen the inside of a courtroom or pleaded a case before a jury. And it was obvious where the new profits would come from. They would come from the land itself.

  An extraordinary thing was happening. Strangers were buying land in Dement. No law could prevent them. Townsend believed there was something metaphysical about the organization of a town. Which things went where, and how it looked to the naked eve. On Blake Street there was the Intelligencer and next to it the telephone company, and then Wootworth’s, Levay’s, Steppe’s, the cafeteria (whose proprietor made book), Walgreen’s, the shoe store, and the courthouse in the square. The look of a town was no less important than the look of a human being. For as many years as he could remember, the Reilly Bog behind his own cornfield had been a topographical fact, part of the condition of life: it was a barrier to the east, and had always been a barrier. The bog was useless, too damp and thick to hike in, and inconvenient. The road east had to be detoured around it, a useful reminder of the preeminence of nature. Now they proposed to take part of this bog and turn it into a housing project and shopping center. They had bought it from the Reilly heirs through “nominees,” no one understanding what was happening until all the parcels were put together. He, Townsend, was responsible for that failure; he had not identified the threat until it was too late. Now they had the land and intended to drain it and fill it, thereby “reclaiming” it, as if its highest and best use was not a bog but a parking lot. No outsider would ever understand: they would argue persuasively that this was progress, a thousand houses on two hundred acres of land; houses for families who had no place to live. And of course the broker was a Chicago man, a lawyer who had never seen the inside of a courtroom. So what? What did that prove? Some of the younger men (Charles Rising among them) argued that the project was good for everyone. The town would annex the land and that would give it political control, the taxes flowing to the town treasury. A thousand houses built over two years, a population growth of four or five thousand souls. The bog, a physical fact for millennia, would be drained and filled—the edges of it anyway; the part of it closest to downtown Dement—and who could argue that this was not beneficial? He and Amos were uncertain, that was the truth of it; and their objections sounded false and sentimental even to themselves. The younger men listened to them with elaborate courtesy and tolerance, and didn’t believe a word. Why would they? But he knew he loved the place as it was, and remembered hunting it as a young man. He loved the Reilly Bog for the same reason he loved Amos, for its sanctuary and permanence. It was the way he felt about the region itself, no paradise unless you saw beauty in straight lines and flat vistas and slow-flowing muddy rivers; a place enclosed by its very openness. Approaching Dement from any direction, Townsend could name the owners of every farm and the number of acres under cultivation. He had searched their titles and drawn their wills for half a century. Their houses were set far back from the road, discouraging to visitors. In the beginning the road was important only as a way in. Now it was a way out. These were families who had spent their lives inside the boundaries of the county, cultivating the land and adhering closely to it and to each other. The farms would stay in the families; he’d written wills of such complexity as to tax the ingenuity of Mr. Justice Holmes. The truth was, they were a landlocked people.

  The point he and Amos had tried to enforce was this. Open the town to development and speculation, and control would be lost. It did not take a Tiresias to imagine the day when everything, land, businesses, families, would be part of some other, larger complex. More outsiders, more blood in the water. The town would be occupied by foreigners and there would be no limit to their rapacity. Dement would be occupied as surely as any ignorant African “nation” had been occupied by French or British. It was money on a rampage and he guessed, after all, that that was it. That was what he didn’t trust, though it sounded queer to say so. He and Amos had worried the problem for a year, to no satisfactory result. Through a surrogate, Townsend was fighting the housing project in circuit court, but his hopes were not high. Amos had said at last, “If the housing thing isn’t settled before I die, you do what the boys want. I don’t think they understand the consequences, but that’s their lookout. But you watch it. And watch them.”

  Townsend agreed; they had no choice. How did you fight, and with what weapons? Charles Rising was a very different man from his father. He was a fine businessman and you needed one, God knows. Those two years, ’35 and ’36, the paper had almost gone under, thanks to the New Deal Depression. Amos had never understood how it was done, Charles’s particular scheme of “refinance.” And he had never bothered to explain it. Charles was single-minded and not inquisitive. He remembered once, it was years ago, he had taken Charles to the Field Museum in Chicago, where they’d lingered for many minutes over the suits of armor. The boy was restless and impatient, and later confessed to boredom. Townsend was unable to communicate his fascination with the armor, his admiration for the ingenuity and austere design. He tried to explain it to Charles, his fascination for armor—burgonets, breastplates, elbow gauntlets, cuirasses of all sorts. It amused him that the more invulnerable the armor became the more useless it was for any sort of warfare. Too heavy and clumsy, the infantry could not maneuver; it was impregnable but incapable of advance. Then of course with the invention of gunpowder the armor was suddenly worthless absolutely. Townsend was a man of deep-running pessimism, and he thought he saw a lesson in all that, and bought a burgonet for an absurd price and placed it atop his law library in the office. Charles saw no point to it at all ...

  Amos, he said aloud. Then Townsend murmured a short prayer, his head heavy and bowed, and turned to go home.

  ELLIOTT Townsend moved slowly through the cornfield. It was entirely dark now and the cold had a harsh bite to it. The scarecrow was swaying in the breeze, its tatters flapping. He pulled the greatcoat around him and lit a fresh cigar, the match warming his fingers. He looked then at his watch, squinting at it in the darkness, reading the numbers with difficulty, and then peered at the old Ashcroft house. He pulled his eyes away after a moment and moved past the big crooked oak, its branches creaking, black against the starless sky; ugly tree, so familiar. He climbed the back stairs leading to the kitchen and the warm light within. Inside, he shed his coat and put it in the closet and laid his hat on the kitchen table atop the newspaper. He wanted the hat handy. The newspaper headline read:

&
nbsp; TRUMAN DEFENDS WHITE; SCORES SEN. MCCARTHY

  It was an account of the haberdasher’s radio talk the night before, the former President undignified again in trying to justify his wretched regime and his cronies while denigrating American patriots, fierce men who understood menace, alien ideologies ... Townsend glanced at the headline, then went to the refrigerator and took out the ice tray and gently placed two cubes in a glass. He stood very still for a moment, an old stooped man, momentarily puzzled by his surroundings. For an instant he thought Amos was there, the two of them preparing to go into the parlor for a visit. Then the image faded and he straightened and poured two fingers of brandy into his glass. He stood at the sideboard, sipping slowly, taking time to compose himself, emptying his mind of reminiscence and memory. Not so easy to do, he thought; a man left pieces of himself wherever he went. He’d turned on the other lights and the downstairs was now ablaze. He rubbed his hands together and did a little awkward shuffle, warming himself by the radiator.

  The telephone rang and he dipped his head as if struck. God, no. He slumped against the sideboard, feeling his heart pound. He stood limp and still. Then he drained the brandy and coughed loudly, clearing his throat. The sound echoed in the empty house. He picked up the telephone after the third ring.

  “Dad’s gone,” Charles Rising said.

  “Yes,” Townsend said. “I’ll be right over.”

  “He passed away an hour ago. I tried to get you before, called twice. He just slept away, Elliott. But I was worried about you, you said you’d be home.”

  “Oh,” he said, and thought for a moment that his voice would break. “I was just taking a little walk, walking out back. In his sleep?”

  Charles said, “Thank God.”

  “Yes.” He held the telephone tight against his ear and spoke with his eyes closed. “I’ll come right over.”